The linked story is "White House told of militant claim two hours after Libya attack: emails."

The famous question from Watergate was "What did the President know and when did he know it?"

In 1973 and 1974 [Howard] Baker was... the influential ranking minority member of the Senate committee... that investigated the Watergate scandal. He is famous for having asked aloud, "What did the President know and when did he know it?", a question given him to ask by his counsel and former campaign manager, future U.S. Senator Fred Thompson.

I’m not sure that there is anything that is directly noteworthy about a massive crowd for a major-party candidate at the end of the presidential cycle. Both candidates will have at least 60 million people voting for them in this election, which means there are going to be lots of people who will show up for these kinds of events. But will they climb hills and mountains and trek out to the middle of nowhere to do it? The Denver Post put together this visually stunning video of Mitt Romney’s event at Red Rocks, which also shows the difficulties that attendees had in getting to the rally at all:

The rally itself didn’t disappoint, either. Romney spoke to the 10,000 people who managed to climb into the venue and squeeze in among the rocks, telling them that Barack Obama’s time had passed — and so have his “status quo” ideas of governance:A confident Mitt Romney, two weeks out from Election Day, spoke about his campaign as a movement sweeping the nation during a moonlit rally at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on Tuesday night.Repeatedly, Romney referred to President Barack Obama as a president whose time has passed — out of ideas to improve the economy and out of touch with the needs of business owners. Romney said his own plans would restore American prosperity and prestige.“The president’s status-quo campaign … is why he’s slipping, and it’s why we’re gaining,” said Romney, who was joined at the rally by running mate Paul Ryan. “It’s why this movement is growing across the country.”Romney and Ryan weren’t shy about discussing the debates, either. Romney told the crowd that they “supercharged” the campaign, an undeniable fact, especially in Colorado, which has suddenly lurched toward Romney in the polls. It’s also undeniable in the fact that Romney could get this many people out to what looks like a fairly rugged venue for a big rally — and on a weeknight, too.But even if that doesn’t impress you, be sure to watch the video for some gorgeous visuals of the crowd at twilight and in the evening. That’s worth two minutes of your time.

Debates Within The DebateBy DICK MORRISPublished on TheHill.com on October 23, 2012

Printer-Friendly VersionThere were at least four separate debates going on Monday night when the candidates met for the last of their presidential match-ups.

The foreign-policy debate was the contest that was advertised. It largely featured agreement between the candidates. If anyone had hoped that a Romney presidency would represent a sharp break with Obama's policies on Iran, Iraq, Libya or Russia, they were disappointed. Only on China was there a real difference of opinion. Romney's tougher stand on Beijing will win him points in the Midwest.

Particularly during the first third of the debate, Romney appeared shaky, weak and unsure of his ground. He got better as the evening progressed and was strong in his attacks on Obama's apology tour, but at first he was weaker than we have seen him in the other debates.

Romney missed the chance to go after Obama on Libya. The last thing the Republican nominee wants is a foreign-policy issue in the last two weeks of the campaign when he is winning so handily on the economy.

The Economic Debate

Wisely, Romney took the debate back onto domestic policy by using it to remind voters of his economic agenda. About one-third of the time was devoted to the economy. And, on that issue, Romney was the overwhelming winner. Obama's defense of his own policies and record and his attack on Romney's plans was weak and even feeble. Since the economy is the major issue -- and Romney now owns it -- the political impact of the debate will focus on the discussion of what would, in other times, be a domestic concern.

Romney vs. Bush

The modern Democratic Party was founded during the last decade by those who came to dislike George W. Bush with an unseemly intensity. To these voters, more women than men, Bush-43 seemed like a latter-day cowboy, shooting from the hip and posturing that he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive." The Bush machismo left female voters alienated, and the ongoing war in Iraq sapped their patience in particular.

So a big part of Obama's campaign to keep female voters has centered on a critique linking Romney to the Bush agenda and style. But Mitt was having none of it on Monday night. Repeatedly, he invoked the need for world peace. Where he might have excoriated China, he said that its leaders wanted a world that is "open and free." Really? I hadn't noticed. He swore off war in Iran -- unless as a last resort -- and made clear that boots on the ground and even a no-fly zone were not options he would consider in Syria. Nobody could depict Romney as a warmonger after this debate.

The Likability Debate

Here, Romney made up for any ground he lost on the foreign-policy issues. The contrast between the surly, nasty, petulant, impolite and intrusive president and the restrained dignity of his opponent was telling. Voters -- particularly women -- would have to come away from the contest liking Romney a lot more than they liked Obama.

Gone was the loft and majesty of Obama's 2008 campaign, and in its place was a petty politician, running scared, sounding desperate and using every chance he had to score partisan points. When Romney invoked his bipartisan work in Massachusetts, the contrast was vivid. On the one side was cooperation, and on the other, gridlock. And when Romney warned that "attacking me is not an agenda," the contrast was telling.

In the past three weeks, Romney has not only gained in vote share, but has increased his personal favorability to the point where it now exceeds the president's. Anyone watching the third debate would rather have Romney over for dinner than Obama. And who would want to have a beer with that peevish nitpicker of a president?

The net effect of the debate will be to help propel Romney to even higher vote shares. He was presidential, dignified and personable. He has used the debates to resurrect a candidacy that was languishing and make it into a presidential juggernaut.

Why Obama's Actions in Libya Should Cost Him the Electionfrom Reason Magazine by Andrew Napolitano

The final presidential debate earlier this week was a tailor-made opportunity for Mitt Romney to rip into President Obama's inconsistent, value-free and at times incoherent foreign policy. And it was also an opportunity for the president to explain his administration's material misrepresentations on the murders of our ambassador and others in Libya. Instead, we heard silence from both of them on this topic.

One can conclude from this that the president uttered a silent sigh of relief when he dodged a bullet. And one can conclude that Romney wanted to look and sound presidential and emphasize his economic credentials and allay fears that he wants another war. Whatever the gain and whatever the strategy, this matter of American deaths in Libya is of vital importance to American voters.

It is important because it shows how far the American government has drifted from the confines of the Constitution and how far we as a people have drifted from the rule of law. The president bombed Libya last year in a successful effort to remove Col. Gadhafi from power. Gadhafi was a monster, but he kept the streets safe, the mobs from foreign embassies and consulates, and the terrorists in jail.

In 2005, President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair praised Gadhafi as a partner in the war on terror because he disposed of his nuclear weaponry and he arrested and resisted al-Qaida operatives. Obama, who last year claimed he did not have the time to seek authorization from Congress to bomb Libya as the Constitution requires, but did have the time to seek approvals from NATO and the Arab League, also claimed at the time and as recently as last Monday night that there were no American boots on the ground during the bombing. That, of course, is patently false and is known to be false.

American fighter planes (boots in the skies) would not be sent to bomb a foreign land without guidance from troops on the ground. I suspect that by "boots," Obama meant "uniforms." We know that American intelligence agents and American Special Forces -- neither of whose personnel wear uniforms, but most of whom no doubt wear boots on their feet in the Libyan desert -- were there, are still there and were providing intelligence about Gadhafi and his military to aid the assault by U.S. warplanes.

The assault was devastating not only to the Gadhafi government, but also to the Libyan people. It destroyed much of Libyan authority structures as they then existed. Not only were Libyan government personnel and buildings and equipment destroyed, but so were Libyan intelligence agents and assets, police stations, roads and bridges, and innocent civilians, as well. This resulted not only in the death of Gadhafi and the destruction of his government, but also in a vacuum into which moved the roving gangs of militias who reign there today. The militias opened up Gadhafi's jails and released many of the prisoners Bush and Blair had praised Gadhafi for incarcerating.

Fast-forward to September 11th of this year, and some of these al-Qaida-led and populated gangs murdered our ambassador and his colleagues. The Obama administration -- which knew of the al-Qaida role in all this and knew that the president's unconstitutional behavior facilitated that role -- denied what it knew and dispatched the American ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, to deliver lies to the American public. Rice claimed on five TV shows that U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed by the spontaneous reaction of ordinary Libyans to a cheap Hollywood-made YouTube clip about Mohammed -- not by an organized terrorist gang.

Shortly after Stevens' murder, European newspapers began to speculate that though Stevens was the bona fide U.S. ambassador to Libya, he was also a member of the U.S. intelligence community, as were his now-murdered colleagues. Earlier this week, my colleagues at Fox News discovered that the building in which they were killed was and was known locally to be a CIA facility, and that the future Ambassador Stevens had used that facility to meet with Libyan rebels during the Gadhafi years.

Now we can connect some dots. If Stevens was a CIA agent, he was in violation of international law by acting as the U.S. ambassador. And if he and his colleagues were intelligence officials, they are not typically protected by Marines, because they ought to have been able to take care of themselves. And if Rice knowingly lied to the American public about a matter as grave as this, she should be fired, no matter who asked her to lie. And 14 days before a crucial presidential election, when both major-party candidates have an audience of 60 million voters, why were they mysteriously silent about all this? Might U.S. intelligence agents who routinely brief Romney have whispered the same instructions into his ear that they received from the president when they briefed him?

I still think Romney has a far better understanding of economic forces and a far superior appreciation for the free market than does Obama. But I had hoped he could demonstrate a better understanding of the proper role of the U.S. in foreign lands than has the president.

On this from Romney, thus far we have heard only silence; from the president, only boasts.

We all say Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. But it's all still Denver, Denver, and the mystery that maybe isn't a mystery at all.

If Cincinnati and Lake County go for Mitt Romney on Nov. 6 it will be because of what happened in Denver on Oct. 3. If Barack Obama barely scrapes through, if there's a bloody and prolonged recount, it too will be because of Denver.

Nothing echoes out like that debate. It was the moment that allowed Mr. Romney to break through, that allowed dismay with the incumbent to coalesce, that allowed voters to consider the alternative. What the debate did to the president is what the Yankees' 0-4 series against the Tigers did at least momentarily, to the team's relationship with their city. "Dear Yankees, We don't date losers. Signed, New Yorkers" read the Post's headline.

America doesn't date losers either.

Why was the first debate so toxic for the president? Because the one thing he couldn't do if he was going to win the election is let all the pent-up resentment toward him erupt. Americans had gotten used to him as The President. Whatever his policy choices, whatever general direction he seemed to put in place he was The President, a man who had gotten there through natural gifts and what all politicians need, good fortune.

What he couldn't do was present himself, when everyone was looking, as smaller than you thought. Petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself. He couldn't afford to make himself look less impressive than the challenger in terms of command, grasp of facts, size.

But that's what he did.

And in some utterly new way the president was revealed, exposed. All the people whose job it is to surround and explain him, to act as his buffers and protectors—they weren't there. It was him on the stage, alone with a competitor. He didn't have a teleprompter, and so his failure seemed to underscore the cliché that the prompter is a kind of umbilical cord for him, something that provides nourishment, the thing he needs to sound good. He is not by any means a stupid man but he has become a boring one; he drones, he is predictable, it's never new. The teleprompter adds substance, or at least safety.

***A great and assumed question, the one that's still floating out there, is what exactly happened when Mr. Obama did himself in? What led to it?

Was it the catastrophic execution of an arguably sound strategy? Perhaps the idea was to show the president was so unimpressed by his challenger that he could coolly keep him at bay by not engaging. Maybe Mr. Obama's handlers advised: "The American people aren't impressed by this flip-flopping, outsourcing plutocrat, and you will deepen your bond with the American people, Mr. President, by expressing in your bearing, through your manner and language, how unimpressed you are, too." So he sat back and let Mr. Romney come forward. But Mr. Romney was poised, knowledgeable, presidential. It was a mistake to let that come forward!

Peggy Noonan's Blog Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist..Was it the catastrophic execution of a truly bad strategy? Maybe they assumed the election was already pretty much in the bag, don't sweat it, just be your glitteringly brilliant self and let Duncan the Wonder Horse go out there and turn people off. But nothing was in the bag. The sheer number of people who watched—a historic 70 million—suggests a lot of voters were still making up their minds.

Maybe the president himself didn't think he could possibly be beaten because he's so beloved. Presidents are always given good news, to keep their spirits up. The poll numbers he'd been seeing, the get-out-the-vote reports, the extraordinary Internet effort to connect with every lonely person in America, which is a lot of persons—maybe everything he was hearing left him thinking his position was impregnable.

But maybe these questions are all off. Maybe what happened isn't a mystery at all.

That, anyway, is the view expressed this week by a member of the U.S. Senate who served there with Mr Obama and has met with him in the White House. People back home, he said, sometimes wonder what happened with the president in the debate. The senator said, I paraphrase: I sort of have to tell them that it wasn't a miscalculation or a weird moment. I tell them: I know him, and that was him. That guy on the stage, that's the real Obama.

***Which gets us to Bob Woodward's "The Price of Politics," published last month. The portrait it contains of Mr. Obama—of a president who is at once over his head, out of his depth and wholly unaware of the fact—hasn't received the attention it deserves. Throughout the book, which is a journalistic history of the president's key economic negotiations with Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama is portrayed as having the appearance and presentation of an academic or intellectual while being strangely clueless in his reading of political situations and dynamics. He is bad at negotiating—in fact doesn't know how. His confidence is consistently greater than his acumen, his arrogance greater than his grasp.

He misread his Republican opponents from day one. If he had been large-spirited and conciliatory he would have effectively undercut them, and kept them from uniting. (If he'd been large-spirited with Mr. Romney, he would have undercut him, too.) Instead he was toughly partisan, he shut them out, and positions hardened. In time Republicans came to think he doesn't really listen, doesn't really hear. So did some Democrats. Business leaders and mighty CEOs felt patronized: After inviting them to meet with him, the president read from a teleprompter and included the press. They felt like "window dressing." One spoke of Obama's surface polish and essential remoteness. In negotiation he did not cajole, seduce, muscle or win sympathy. He instructed. He claimed deep understanding of his adversaries and their motives but was often incorrect. He told staffers that John Boehner, one of 11 children of a small-town bar owner, was a "country club Republican." He was often patronizing, which in the old and accomplished is irritating but in the young and inexperienced is infuriating. "Boehner said he hated going down to the White House to listen to what amounted to presidential lectures," Mr. Woodward writes.

Mr. Obama's was a White House that had—and showed—no respect for Republicans trying to negotiate with Republicans. Through it all he was confident—"Eric, don't call my bluff"—because he believed, as did his staff, that his talents would save the day.

They saved nothing. Washington became immobilized.

Mr. Woodward's portrait of the president is not precisely new—it has been drawn in other ways in other accounts, and has been a staple of D.C. gossip for three years now—but it is vivid and believable. And there's probably a direct line between that portrait and the Obama seen in the first debate. Maybe that's what made it so indelible, and such an arc-changer.

People saw for the first time an Obama they may have heard about on radio or in a newspaper but had never seen.

They didn't see some odd version of the president. They saw the president.

Gallup Explains Why Other Polls Are WrongBy DICK MORRISPublished on DickMorris.com on October 29, 2012

Printer-Friendly VersionIn a large sample, very important survey, Gallup reported on Friday that the likely 2012 electorate will be among the most Republican in history.

In 2008, 12 percent more self-described Democrats voted than Republicans (54-42). In 2004, the electorate was 48-48 evenly split between the parties. In Gallup's poll, they found that in 2012 it will be 46-49 for the Republicans -- a fifteen point swing from 2008!

The reason most other polls are wrong is that, seeing this Republican surge, they discount it as sampling error in their polls and re-weight the data to make it conform to the traditional partisan divisions, thus obliterating the real trend and obscuring what is actually going on.

The fact is that the country has moved sharply in the direction of the Republican Party since 2008 and even since 2010.

Want to know how much Romney will win by?

Obama won by 7 points in 2008. But the electorate has become 15 points more Republican since then. Do the math -- an 8 point Romney victory! OK, maybe 5 or 6 or 7, but no cliffhanger.

Labor Dept. May Not Release Jobs Report Before Election DayThere is one more jobs report due before Election Day. It is scheduled to be released this Friday, giving the candidates about four days to play up or dismiss the numbers. However, the Labor Department says it may not release the report on time... citing difficulties due to Hurricane Sandy.

Labor Dept. May Not Release Jobs Report Before Election DayThere is one more jobs report due before Election Day. It is scheduled to be released this Friday, giving the candidates about four days to play up or dismiss the numbers. However, the Labor Department says it may not release the report on time... citing difficulties due to Hurricane Sandy.

The whole Benghazi story and its lack of followup makes me angry and puzzled. I don't understand why they are not called out to answer for the lies, shiny objects and deceptions. There wasn't a video or a video maker in the Benghazi story, but we were told there was. There was a multiple hour struggle with security within reach, ordered to stand down. Why? By whom? Don't we deserve to know?

We made mistakes, misjudged the threat, misjudged the security needed. Why not come forward early on and say so? What have we learned? In hind-sight, what would we do differently, what should we do differently, right now? None of it asked. None of it answered.

Sec. of State Hillary Clinton didn't take responsibility in any real way, just admitted she was Sec of State when it happened. President Obama didn't take responsibility in any real way, really just admitted he is President and is ultimately responsible.

Military leadership doesn't say stand down or don't protect our resources. Civilian leadership had a reason for doing that. I am all for civilian leadership over our military. That is because we have more than one way to remove and replace them.

I would rather run them out with the accurate information than without it.

There is a lot we don't know about the specific terror network and perpetrators. There isn't a lot the administration doesn't know about the U.S. side of the story.

If this is all national secret, then brief select members of congress.

But why should they answer or say anything. Lessons were learned with Fast and Furious. An Executive branch with no knowledge claimed Executive privilege. The Attorney General was charged with Contempt of Congress and a majority of his own party supported that. Yet he is still Attorney General with no consequence and the President is still running roughly even in the polls despite a horrendous economy.

When Mondale lost 49 states to Reagan, MN seemed for a moment to be American's furthest to the left state. Then Mondale lost statewide in MN in 2002 becoming the first and only person to ever lose statewide in all 50.

Minnesota Poll now has Obama in MN by just +3, inside the sampling margin of error.

Voters have figured out that President Obama has no message, no agenda and not even much of an explanation for what he has done over the past four years. His campaign is based entirely on persuading people that Mitt Romney is a uniquely bad man, entirely dedicated to the rich, ignorant of the problems of the average person. As long as he could run his negative ads, the campaign at least kept voters away from the Romney bandwagon. But once we all met Mitt Romney for three 90-minute debates, we got to know him -- and to like him. He was not the monster Obama depicted, but a reasonable person for whom we could vote.

As we stripped away Obama's yearlong campaign of vilification, all the president offered us was more servings of negative ads -- ads we had already dismissed as not credible. He kept doing the same thing even as it stopped working.

The result was that the presidential race reached a tipping point. Reasonable voters saw that the voice of hope and optimism and positivism was Romney while the president was only a nitpicking, quarrelsome, negative figure. The contrast does not work in Obama's favor.

His erosion began shortly after the conventions when Indiana (10 votes) and North Carolina (15) moved to Romney (in addition to the 179 votes that states that McCain carried cast this year).

Then, in October, Obama lost the Southern swing states of Florida (29) and Virginia (13). He also lost Colorado (10), bringing his total to 255 votes.

And now, he faces the erosion of the northern swing states: Ohio (18), New Hampshire (4) and Iowa (6). Only in the union-anchored state of Nevada (9) does Obama still cling to a lead.

In the next few days, the battle will move to Pennsylvania (20), Michigan (15), Wisconsin (10) and Minnesota (16). Ahead in Pennsylvania, tied in Michigan and Wisconsin, and slightly behind in Minnesota, these new swing states look to be the battleground.

Or will the Romney momentum grow and wash into formerly safe Democratic territory in New Jersey and Oregon?

Once everyone discovers that the emperor has no clothes (or that Obama has no argument after the negative ads stopped working), the vote shift could be of historic proportions.

The impact on Senate races could be profound. Give the GOP easy pickups in Nebraska and North Dakota. Wisconsin has been a roller coaster. Once an easy win for Republican Tommy Thompson, then a likely loss as Democrat Tammy Baldwin caught up, and now Republican again, it will probably be a third pickup. Romney's surge in Virginia is propelling George Allen to a good lead for the first time all campaign. In Montana, Republican Denny Rehberg holds and has held for some time a small lead over Democrat incumbent Jon Tester. And, in Pennsylvania, Smith has powered his campaign to a small lead over Democrat Bob Casey Jr.

The GOP now leads in these six takeaways. But it is also within easy striking distance in Ohio and Florida, where incumbents are under 50 percent and Republican challengers Connie Mack (Fla.) and Josh Mandel (Ohio) are only a few points behind. It may even be possible to entertain daydreams of Rhode Island (Barry Hinckley) and New Jersey (Joe Kyrillos) going Republican.

Republican losses? Look for a giveback in Maine and possibly in Indiana and Massachusetts. In Indiana, Republican Richard Mourdock had established a 5-point lead over Democrat Joe Donnelly. But his comments about rape knocked him back to a tie. With Romney carrying the state by 15 points, however, Mourdock could still make it. In Massachusetts, Brown has been in hand-to-hand combat with Elizabeth Warren. Down by five a few days ago, he's now tied, but the undecided usually goes against the incumbent.

The most likely outcome? Eight GOP takeaways and two giveaways for a net gain of six. A 53-47 Senate, just like we have now, only opposite.

Morris is quite optimistic. On election night, watch for Romney to win Virginia by 3 or more for an indicator of which direction it is going.

Only in the full sweep scenario do Republicans also take the Senate. 11 Senate seats are still tossups and the polling isn't that accurate. The result will depend on who shows up in a lot of different places.

---------Interesting campaign tidbit: It's the final weekend in such a large nation and both Obama and Romney are going to Dubuque on Saturday. I doubt if there is more than one airport in Iowa's 9th largest city.

Feeling very frustrated with Mitt tonight. The timidity of his campaign has turned what should have been a rampage through the wasteland of the record of the worst president of my lifetime into a real nail biter.

This forum would be a wonderful resource for someone looking for hundreds of specific devastating points that would have Obama off balance all day every day. Instead, the man won't even touch Benghazi

Feeling very frustrated with Mitt tonight. The timidity of his campaign has turned what should have been a rampage through the wasteland of the record of the worst president of my lifetime into a real nail biter.

This forum would be a wonderful resource for someone looking for hundreds of specific devastating points that would have Obama off balance all day every day. Instead, the man won't even touch Benghazi

Agreed, though with the increase of stupidity and entrenchment of the leech class, it may not pay to be more aggressive now.

Feeling very frustrated with Mitt tonight. The timidity of his campaign has turned what should have been a rampage through the wasteland of the record of the worst president of my lifetime into a real nail biter.

This forum would be a wonderful resource for someone looking for hundreds of specific devastating points that would have Obama off balance all day every day. Instead, the man won't even touch Benghazi

Agreed, though with the increase of stupidity and entrenchment of the leech class, it may not pay to be more aggressive now.

Yes, at this point in the campaign he is speaking to the one percent or less in the dead center of the electorate between Obama and Romney in a couple of counties of a couple of states in a language I don't expect to be able to understand.

I hope they know what they are doing.

To some extent it is the job of others to expose the opponent and his job to be the positive alternative.

Agreed too late to do anything different now, I'm just expressing deep frustration and fear. Sure hope Morris is right , , ,God Bless America.

---------It is time for everyone involved to find and adopt an undecided or leaning voter between now and Tuesday. I have one friend in mind who is a former Republican and has leaned left more recently and I am working to make sure my daughter's first ballot gets turned in on time no matter how she fills it out.

Call personally on election day and confirm with every like minded person you know that we all showed up.

The difference of Obamacare passing or not might have happened right in my mostly conservative town of 1000. The recount from R to D to make the 60 Senator shift on just a few votes might have been people out here who were too busy or thought it wouldn't matter. It mattered - big time.

It doesn't seem like it sometimes, but one more vote in Calif, Minn, and every other place does make a difference. The margin of victory matters. It matters in the close races and it matters in places not close to start to change or build any momentum to get good candidates and messages to come forward in the future.

“Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” That was Barack Obama in 2008. And he was right. Reagan was an ideological inflection point, ending a 50-year liberal ascendancy and beginning a 30-year conservative ascendancy.

It is common for one party to take control and enact its ideological agenda. Ascendancy, however, occurs only when the opposition inevitably regains power and then proceeds to accept the basic premises of the preceding revolution.

Thus, Republicans railed for 20 years against the New Deal. Yet when they regained the White House in 1953, they kept the New Deal intact.

And when Nixon followed LBJ’s Great Society — liberalism’s second wave — he didn’t repeal it. He actually expanded it. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), gave teeth to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and institutionalized affirmative action — major adornments of contemporary liberalism.

Until Reagan. Ten minutes into his presidency, Reagan declares that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Having thus rhetorically rejected the very premise of the New Deal/Great Society, he sets about attacking its foundations — with radical tax reduction, major deregulation, a frontal challenge to unionism (breaking the air traffic controllers for striking illegally) and an (only partially successful) attempt at restraining government growth.

Reaganism’s ascendancy was confirmed when the other guys came to power and their leader, Bill Clinton, declared (in his 1996 State of the Union address) that “the era of big government is over” — and then abolished welfare, the centerpiece “relief” program of modern liberalism.

In Britain, the same phenomenon: Tony Blair did to Thatcherism what Clinton did to Reaganism. He made it the norm.

Obama’s intention has always been to re-normalize, to reverse ideological course, to be the anti-Reagan — the author of a new liberal ascendancy. Nor did he hide his ambition. In his February 2009 address to Congress he declared his intention to transform America. This was no abstraction. He would do it in three areas: health care, education and energy.

Think about that. Health care is one-sixth of the economy. Education is the future. And energy is the lifeblood of any advanced country — control pricing and production, and you’ve controlled the industrial economy.

And it wasn’t just rhetoric. He enacted liberalism’s holy grail: the nationalization of health care. His $830 billion stimulus, by far the largest spending bill in U.S. history, massively injected government into the free market — lavishing immense amounts of tax dollars on favored companies and industries in a naked display of industrial policy.

And what Obama failed to pass through Congress, he enacted unilaterally by executive action. He could not pass cap-and-trade, but his EPA is killing coal. (No new coal-fired power plant would ever be built.) In 2006, liberals failed legislatively to gut welfare’s work requirement. Obama’s new Health and Human Services rule does that by fiat. Continued in a second term, it would abolish welfare reform as we know it — just as in a second term, natural gas will follow coal, as Obama’s EPA regulates fracking into noncompetitiveness.

Government grows in size and power as the individual shrinks into dependency. Until the tipping point where dependency becomes the new norm — as it is in Europe, where even minor retrenchment of the entitlement state has led to despair and, for the more energetic, rioting.

An Obama second term means that the movement toward European-style social democracy continues, in part by legislation, in part by executive decree. The American experiment — the more individualistic, energetic, innovative, risk-taking model of democratic governance — continues to recede, yielding to the supervised life of the entitlement state.

If Obama loses, however, his presidency becomes a historical parenthesis, a passing interlude of overreaching hyper-liberalism, rejected by a center-right country that is 80 percent nonliberal.

Should they summon the skill and dexterity, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan could guide the country to the restoration of a more austere and modest government with more restrained entitlements and a more equitable and efficient tax code. Those achievements alone would mark a new trajectory — a return to what Reagan started three decades ago.

Every four years we are told that the coming election is the most important of one’s life. This time it might actually be true. At stake is the relation between citizen and state, the very nature of the American social contract.

"ASAP"...So that we are clear on this all, here is the record:''It took Barack Obama seven days to visit Joplin, Missouri after a tornado wiped out half of the town and killed 120 people......It took Barack Obama 14 days to visit the Gulf Coast after the BP oil spill....Obama declined to visit Tennessee after the historic 2010 "1000-year floods."...Obama ignored the Texas wildfires when over 400 homes were lost....And, of course, Obama ignored the calls for help from Benghazi.......But it took Barack Obama only one day to visit the hurricane damage on the East Coast. Then again, there’s an election next week.''

Democrats have enlisted thousands of young illegal immigrants to drag their supporters to the polls on Election Day tomorrow.

These get-out-the-vote workers may or may not be breaking the law by helping with voter mobilization. Because the workers are already unlawfully present in the United States, presumably all employment they engage in –including electioneering— already violates laws against unauthorized employment.

It’s not like their patron, President Obama, would do anything about it anyway. This past summer Obama swept aside federal law in order to pander to this growing constituency. In a move more imperial than presidential, Obama bypassed Congress and partially implemented the so-called proposed DREAM Act which would have offered a path to U.S. citizenship for youthful illegals who served in the armed forces or attended college. Up to 1.4 million illegal aliens could benefit from the move.

Using undocumented aliens as election workers is a new low for the activist Left.

“For people who aren’t supposed to be in the country in the first place to be deployed for partisan advantage is the last straw,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that favors limits on immigration levels.

“‘The strategic deployment’ of illegal immigrants who benefit from the Obama administration program is a ‘corruption of the political process,’” he said.

And there can be little doubt that some of the Obama supporters these election workers cajol into voting booths will themselves be illegal immigrants ineligible to vote in the national election. Lax, and in some cases non-existent ID requirements, at the state level will allow people to vote who have no legal right to vote.

In the battleground state of Nevada, Culinary Workers Union Local 226 is strong-arming union members who are bona fide U.S. permanent residents into unlawfully casting ballots. (Permanent residents, or green card holders, are allowed to reside and work in the U.S. permanently but are not allowed to vote unless they become naturalized as U.S. citizens.) The union is affiliated with the UNITE HERE labor federation.

Union members who have a shaky grasp of the English language told Glenn Cook of the Las Vegas Review-Journal that they were tricked into signing voter registration forms and are now being pressured to vote. President Obama and Democrats are counting on the unions in Nevada to help get them across the finish line tomorrow.

“One of the immigrants was visited at home by a Culinary representative and said the operative made threats of deportation if no ballot was cast,” Cook writes. He notes that in Nevada no proof of citizenship is required in order to register to vote or to vote. “One would establish identity and one would establish residence,” Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said. “Just like every other voter in Nevada, they will not be asked to prove citizenship.”

In the swing states of Colorado, Florida, and Ohio, the young illegal aliens doing the voter-mobilization work are “often referred to as Dreamers after the failed DREAM Act legislation that would have offered them a path to citizenship.” They are knocking on doors, working in telephone banks, and asking students on college campuses to vote, the Wall Street Journal reports. They are also active in solid-blue California and in Republican-dominated Texas.

The illegal campaign workers are targeting Latinos, a fast-growing demographic that President Obama has urged to “punish” its “enemies.” Obama is reportedly running ahead among Latino voters so the efforts of the so-called Dreamers could help down-ticket candidates in congressional and state races.

One of the leading groups exploiting the free labor of undocumented workers is the Colorado Immigrants Rights Coalition (CIRC). Illegal campaign workers “are winning the hearts and minds of Coloradans through their efforts,” said CIRC executive director Julien Ross.

CIRC pushed the Obama administration to enact a policy, now called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, that lets those under the age of 31 who arrived in this country by age 16 and have lived here for the last five years to seek a renewable two-year reprieve from deportation and work permit.

CIRC has some unsavory friends. It is a “partner” with the far-left Center for Community Change (CCC) and the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON).

CCC is headed by Deepak Bhargava, who worked for a decade at ACORN. CCC sponsored a December 2007 forum for thousands of community organizers from across America. Bhargava introduced speaker Barack Obama at the event and said America was “a society that is still deeply structured by racism and sexism.” He elicited a pledge from Obama that if elected the president in 2008 he would invite CCC and other Saul Alinsky-inspired community organizing groups to “help [the new administration] shape the agenda.”

NDLON’s mission is to interfere with the enforcement of immigration laws and its “strategy is to make legal everything about the illegal immigrant except his immigration status.” The group pressures local governments to set up day laborer centers and works with labor unions to unionize day laborers.

Felipe Sousa-Rodriguez from Brazil thinks illegal aliens getting involved in electoral politics is a great idea.

“We can’t vote but we can get people to vote who support our issues. It’s our way to participate in this democracy,” said Sousa-Rodriguez, who is supervising a get-out-the-vote drive in Florida and Ohio that is co-sponsored by United We Dream, a national undocumented youth network.

United We Dream’s stated mission is to create “meaningful alliances with other national immigrant and education rights organizations and making sure there is a voice for immigrant youth in these organizations.”

One of the group’s more high profile board members is Josh Bernstein. Bernstein is “director of immigration” at the radical labor union SEIU. (Who knew labor unions had directors of immigration?) Back in the 1980s he was director of Californians for a Fair Share, a group created to fight welfare cuts.

Take a guess which political party Bernstein’s illegal election workers –and all the other illegal election workers mentioned in this article— will benefit from all this unpaid labor.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

• It bet the farm on negative ads in swing states. It didn't realize that Mitt's convention speech and the three debates would give him the chance to live down the charges and demonstrate -- through facts and his demeanor -- that they were baseless.

• Obama had no Plan B if the negatives didn't work. He never really laid in a convincing defense of his record, except to recall the mess that he inherited and to try to make people believe things were better. He had no vision for his second term, except more of same. He never moved to the center -- the shift that reelected Bill Clinton.

• Obama drew his list of swing states too narrowly. He did not contemplate that he would be forced to defend Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan or Minnesota and squandered his money contesting unwinnable states like North Carolina. When Romney bypassed Obama's "firewall" states (like the Germans did the French Maginot Line in World War II), the president had not laid in the necessary prophylactic irradiation of negative ads, and three of the states embraced Romney.

• By focusing on the negative, Obama sacrificed first his personal popularity and then his dignity and presidentiality. No longer was he the hope and the change. He became nothing more than a nasty partisan, throwing epithets at his rival. A president does not let himself be quoted as saying that his opponent is a "bullsh--ter" or that voting is the best "revenge." Even his dress was wrong. Instead of appearing in a dark suit, he dressed in an open-neck white shirt, trying to be everyman but succeeding only in not looking like a president.

• Since he offered nothing more than a negative campaign and a grab-bag of special-interest pleadings for single women, unions, college kids and minorities, Obama failed to inspire the turnout that he needed. Against Santorum and Gingrich, Obama could have made the case that their prospective presidencies were sufficiently dangerous that liberals and Democrats must rush to the polls to stop them. But against the congenial Romney, the warnings rang hollow.

• In the first debate, Obama was terrible. We'll likely find out what his excuses are after the polls close. Did he have the flu? Was it the altitude? Had he, as Bob Woodward suggested, just received a dose of bad news? Why did he appear distracted?

• Obama should have gotten the facts out quickly about Benghazi rather than let them drip, drip, drip out over six weeks. He could then have handled the crisis and won points for determination and toughness. Instead, to the very end, he looked like he was covering up the fact of a terrorist attack. Because he was.

• After Sandy, Obama visited New Jersey and surveyed the damage with Gov. Chris Christie (R). He should have stayed on the storm, superintending relief efforts, urging FEMA on, absorbing the lessons of Bush's failure to cope well with Katrina. Instead, he returned to the partisan wars and the strident speeches in swing states.

None of this should take away from Romney's brilliant campaign. By staying on the economy and not being tempted into side issues like Libya, Mitt kept the focus where it needed to be and never let up. His campaign's foray into Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Wisconsin was vital to his chances of victory. More about what Mitt did right in my post-election column on Thursday. But for now, let's celebrate the new president we are about to elect.

I'm not liking the way Romney's lead has shrunk in the last week or two; especially in that undecideds seem to be breaking more for BO, which is contrary to form.

Certainly I pray that MR wins, but his compaign has been remarkably weak and passive. I would have rampaged every day on yet another weakness and failing of the past four years; I would have challenged the specious numbers asserted by BO; I would have challenged so much that has gone uncontested.

As Mark Levin has been saying - getting Romney in the White House is only the first step. Our work will be just beginning. If the way he ran his campaign is any indication of how he will govern/deal with the Dems - we have our work cut out for us. But - the first step is getting him across the finish line - I think Dick Morris and Michael Barone are going to be quite close to correct in their predictions, both of which have Romney winning by a decent margin both the popular vote and the electoral vote.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

We are elected not only the President and the direction of the Senate, but we are also choosing the next Supreme Court!-----------I hate to do more predictions at this late hour when I can so quickly be proven wrong. Before the first debate when things looked hopeless I told a friend Romney by 3. I think he needs to win by 2 or more to be sure to get the electoral college where he needs only 269.

Rasmussen's final is Romney 49, Obama 48. Way within the margin of sampling error in fact separated by only a few poll takers.

Soon we will find out if the polling results were systematically wrong. If so we will see a big Romney win and only in that scenario do R's carry the Senate. If the polls were essentially right it means a deadlock/recount scenario or a close Obama electoral win and a Dem Senate, divided congress. God help us.

The optimism around here comes from thinking we know the facts, a proven miserable favorable is running against a guy with a real chance to turn things around if the House and Senate will let him. All along we assumed people would see that, but so many people are invested in pointing fingers and taxing others that I don't have any idea how this plays out.

There are things I wish our side had done differently, but for now just say this:

GO OUT AND VOTE!! NOW!!!

When you get back, start calling people, the like-minded and the potentially undecided. Let your family, friends know where you stand and let them get used to knowing that they are going to be hearing from you every election day.

Fox News and other media outlets have projected that President Obama has been reelected to a second term. If, in celebrating his victory Obama wanted to give credit where credit is due, he might want to think about calling some of America's top journalists, since their favorable approach almost certainly made the difference between victory and defeat.

Reviewing the 2012 presidential campaign, here are five ways the media elite tipped the public relations scales in favor of the liberal Obama and against the conservative challenger Mitt Romney:

1. The Media’s Biased Gaffe Patrol Hammered Romney: The media unfairly jumped on inconsequential mistakes — or even invented controversies — from Romney and hyped them in to multi-day media “earthquakes.” Case in point: the GOP candidate’s trip to Europe and Israel in late July. A Media Research Center analysis of all 21 ABC, CBS and NBC evening news stories about Romney’s trip found that virtually all of them (18, or 86%) emphasized “diplomatic blunders,” “gaffes” or “missteps.”

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer blasted the news coverage in an August 2 column, calling the trip “a major substantive success” that was wrapped “in a media narrative of surpassing triviality.”

Similarly, when the left-wing Mother Jones magazine in September put out a secretly-recorded video of Romney talking to donors about the 47% of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, the networks hyped it like a sensational sex scandal. Over three days, the broadcast network morning and evening shows churned out 42 stories on the tape, nearly 90 minutes of coverage. The tone was hyperbolic; ABC’s "Good Morning America" called it a “bombshell rocking the Mitt Romney campaign,” while ABC "World News" anchor Diane Sawyer declared it a “political earthquake.”

None of Obama’s gaffes garnered that level of coverage. After the president in a June 8 press conference declared that “the private sector is doing fine,” the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts gave it just one night’s coverage, then basically dropped the story — nothing further on ABC’s "World News" or the "CBS Evening News" in the weeks that followed, and just two passing references on the "NBC Nightly News."

And, when Obama infamously declared, “You didn’t build that,” ABC, CBS, NBC didn’t report the politically damaging remark for four days — and then only after Romney made it the centerpiece of a campaign speech.

2. Pounding Romney With Partisan Fact Checking: There’s nothing wrong with holding politicians accountable for the honesty of their TV ads and stump speeches, but this year the self-appointed media fact-checkers attacked Republicans as liars for statements that were accurate.

For example, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter writing for PolitiFact branded VP candidate Paul Ryan’s convention speech anecdote about the closing of the General Motors plant in his hometown as “false,” even though Ryan was correct in all of his details. The slanted review became TV reporters’ talking points; the next day on NBC, correspondent Chuck Todd grumped that while what Ryan said “was technically factual, by what he left out, [he] actually distorted the actual truth.” Matt Lauer greeted Ryan the following week in an interview on Today: “There are some people who are claiming that you played a little fast and loose with the truth....”

The same thing happened when Mitt Romney talked about Obama’s “apology tour” during the final presidential debate. While in 2009 Obama had, in fact, criticized the United States as “arrogant,” “derisive” and having “too often... set [our] principles aside,” the networks said to call it an “apology tour” was “false” because, as CNN’s John Berman tenuously insisted, “even if he was critical of past U.S. foreign policy, he issued no apologies.”

Writing in the New York Times August 31, correspondent Jackie Calmes scolded that “the number of falsehoods and misleading statements from the Romney campaign coming in for independent criticism has reached a level not typically seen.” That’s not true, either; Romney’s team was, at worst, guilty of highlighting those facts that best illustrated their points (something done by all politicians), and the Obama campaign certainly put out their share of tawdry TV ads and dubious campaign claims.

But with “truth cops” who mainly policed just the GOP side of the street, the media used “fact-checking” as another club to tilt the playing field in favor of the Democrats.

3. Those Biased Debate Moderators: Upset liberals scorned PBS’s Jim Lehrer for taking a hands-off approach in the first debate on October 3, with MSNBC analyst Howard Fineman slamming him as “practically useless” for not jumping into the debate on behalf of President Obama.

Such criticism may have encouraged the activist approach taken by ABC’s Martha Raddatz in the vice presidential debate October 11, and by CNN’s Candy Crowley in the October 16 town hall debate, as both of those journalists repeatedly interrupted the Republican candidate and larded the discussion with a predominantly liberal agenda.

Crowley earns extra demerits for taking the media’s penchant for faulty fact-checking to new heights when she jumped into the October 16 town hall-style debate to validate President Obama’s claim that he called the attack in Benghazi, Libya, “an act of terror” the very next morning. Crowley endorsed Obama’s story, telling Romney: “He did, in fact, sir, call it an act of terror.”

Not according to the transcript, which had Obama only speaking generically about how “no acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this nation,” not assigning that label to the violence in Benghazi.

Wrong though she was, Crowley became a heroine to many in the liberal media; ABC's Matt Dowd, for example, cheered: “What Candy Crowley did, I actually thought, was laudable....I hope we get to do more of that in this discourse.”

Moderators are supposed to ensure both sides get a fair hearing, not pick sides. By leaping into the fray, Candy Crowley epitomized the media’s itch to tilt the scales this year — again, in Obama’s favor.

4. The Benghazi Blackout: Right after the September 11 attack in Libya, the networks proclaimed that the events would bolster President Obama — “reminding voters of his power as commander-in-chief,” as NBC’s Peter Alexander stated on the September 14 edition of "Today." But as a cascade of leaked information erased the portrait of Obama as a heroic commander, the broadcast networks shunted the Benghazi story to the sidelines.

News broke online in late September, for example, that Team Obama knew within 24 hours that the attack was likely the result of terrorism. That starkly contradicted claims from White House press secretary Jay Carney, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and President Obama himself that the attack was a “spontaneous” reaction to an anti-Muslim video posted on YouTube. Yet, ABC took nearly two days to bring this story to viewers, while CBS and NBC held off for three days.

This was, shamefully, the broadcast networks’ pattern in October: New developments exposing the administration’s failure to provide adequate security, or contradictions in their public statements, were either given stingy coverage or buried completely. The puzzle pieces revealed a disturbing failure of Obama’s national security apparatus, but the networks flitted in and out of the story, never giving it any traction.

Instead of an “October Surprise,” the networks engineered an “October Suppression” — keeping a lid on the boiling Benghazi story until Election Day. Who knows how voters might have reacted if the media had covered this story as tenaciously as they did Romney’s “47% gaffe”?

5. Burying the Bad Economy: Pundits agreed that Obama’s weakness was the failure of the US economy to revive after his expensive stimulus and four years of $1 trillion deficits. But the major networks failed to offer the sustained, aggressive coverage of the economy that incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush faced in 1992, or even that George W. Bush faced in 2004 — both years when the national economy was in better shape than it is now.

According to a study conducted that year by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, from January through September of 1992, the networks ran a whopping 1,289 stories on the economy, 88% of which painted it in a dismal, negative light. That fall, the unemployment rate was 7.6%, lower than today’s 7.9%, and economic growth in the third quarter was 2.7%, better than today’s 2.0%. Yet the media coverage hammered the idea of a terrible economy, and Bush lost re-election.

In 2004, the economy under George W. Bush was far better than it is today — higher growth, lower unemployment, smaller deficits and cheaper gasoline — yet network coverage that year was twice as hostile to Bush than it was towards Obama this year, according to a study by the Media Research Center’s Business and Media Institute.

When Republican presidents have faced reelection, network reporters made sure to spotlight economic “victims” — the homeless man, the woman without health insurance, the unemployed worker, the senior citizen who had to choose between medicine and food. But this year, with an economy as bad as any since the Great Depression, those sympathetic anecdotes have vanished from the airwaves — a huge favor to Obama and the Democrats.

Given Obama’s record, the Romney campaign could have overcome much of this media favoritism and still prevailed — indeed, they almost did. But taken together, these five trends took the media’s historical bias to new levels this year, and saved Obama’s presidency in the process.

Two points, and then I hope that we can begin to have a discussion which includes multiple viewpoints and civil discussion. I sincerely hope to see a return to civil discussion in this country.

1. Dick Morris is a blowhard. I've taken him to task elsewhere, but I hope others can see that his credibility at this point is shakey.

2. All the talk of unscientific polls, liberal bias in those polls, etc., etc., etc. There IS a method to the polls. They aren't perfect (hence the margin of error), but they consistently went for Obama. Even in the wake of the terrible Obama showing in the first debate, 538 had Obama with a 70% or so chance at reelection. It was at 90% yesterday morning. Not quite the conservative narrative. And statistical methods won the day. This will increasingly be the case, as the scientific method is improved with technology and the skill of the practicioner. The days of Dewey defeating Truman are gone.

So, given the president's victory, how do we heal as a country and as a people? What can be done, constructively, by us and others to assist in this process? What does the fact that all of the "rape" congressional candidates lost (Mourdock and Akin, the latter decisively in an election that he once had 7-9% lead in)? What does it say that many Tea Party candidates lost or nearly lost? Is the Brown loss in Massachusetts a referendum for the Tea Party in the same way his victory was pitched as such for Obama in 2010? What does it say that the GOP retained the House? Is it simple incumbency or other?

I look forward to meaningful dialogue with you for the next four years.

"As expected, the number of offices in battleground states outpaces the number in other states. Florida and Ohio account for 235 of Obama’s 786 offices (30%), similarly for Romney (31%). Obama has broader coverage (all 50 states) and outpaces Romney everywhere except Utah and Missouri. Obama also has more offices in battleground states (e.g. Ohio has 131 Obama offices vs. 40 for Romney)."

Dick Morris is a blowhard. I've taken him to task elsewhere, but I hope others can see that his credibility at this point is shakey.

But his hair is so telegenic, his loyalties so expedient, and his scruples so lacking that it makes for great TV, assuming you enjoy the sound of fingernails on a blackboard muted by an unctuous grin.

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All the talk of unscientific polls, liberal bias in those polls, etc., etc., etc. There IS a method to the polls. They aren't perfect (hence the margin of error), but they consistently went for Obama. Even in the wake of the terrible Obama showing in the first debate, 538 had Obama with a 70% or so chance at reelection. It was at 90% yesterday morning. Not quite the conservative narrative. And statistical methods won the day. This will increasingly be the case, as the scientific method is improved with technology and the skill of the practicioner. The days of Dewey defeating Truman are gone.

Well kinda. As a second amendment guy I have seen all sorts of dubious polling. The term "assault weapon," for instance, is essentially meaningless yet anti-gun politicians with MSM collusion have worked long and hard to make it appear that black guns are full up automatic weapons. They are not. Hence, when pollsters ask questions about assault weapons they tend to be furthering a false narrative as much as they are gathering data. Indeed, I wonder if all these late season MSM polls had asked "Do you approve of the President's handling of Benghazi," with the MSM explaining why the question is germane, would we have seen a shift in the polls? At the risk of going all McLuhan on you, perhaps we've transcended the "medium is the message" stage and are now on to "the measurements we create and then choose to report are the message."

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So, given the president's victory, how do we heal as a country and as a people?

Heal what exactly? $16 trillion in debt and rising? Easy, stop borrowing money to spend. Is that likely to happen? No. Heal concerns over a vast system electronically monitoring Americans? Doubt we'll be shutting down the NSAs facility in Utah any time soon. Cease herding all Americans toward a socialized health care system? I suspect yesterday's result will be seen as an endorsement of that vast intrusion. And so on. First step toward healing is to stop picking at the wound. Fat chance.

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What can be done, constructively, by us and others to assist in this process?

Ibid. What needs to be done is for freedom loving Americans to quit worrying about who sleeps with whom, put aside concerns about at what point a fetus becomes viable, and unite to toss statist off all stripes out. Alas, I think that what's coming to be known as the Free Sh!t Army comprised of statists and their charges have a leg up on the kind of organizing that will be required to surmount those of a statist bent.

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What does the fact that all of the "rape" congressional candidates lost (Mourdock and Akin, the latter decisively in an election that he once had 7-9% lead in)?

That saying stupid stuff is ill advised, particularly in an environment where the MSM endlessly replays and inflates the gaffs on one side while averting their gaze from the gaffs of those they favor.

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What does it say that many Tea Party candidates lost or nearly lost?

Relentless vilification works, particularly when forums where one can effectively respond to two-dimensional claims are so hard to come by.

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Is the Brown loss in Massachusetts a referendum for the Tea Party in the same way his victory was pitched as such for Obama in 2010?

Hmm, despite the fact Brown worked relentlessly to change his Tea Party stripes and repackage himself in a manner he thought MA would find more progressively palatable? Think it's more of a tea leaves issue: Repubs don't often win national offices out of states as blue as MA, regardless of packaging effort.

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What does it say that the GOP retained the House? Is it simple incumbency or other?

Incumbency for the most part. But at least it allows the hope that statist brakes might be applied every now and then.

1) Romney et al flinched when it came to defining the cause of our economic malaise. They allowed Obama to say it was Bush when it was the housing bubble created by Fannie, Freddie, and the Fed with an assist from the Community Reinvestment Act. Romney should have been making this point with great vigor. The Dems were worse on this than the Reps. The Dems took Congress in 2006, Romney should have been vigorously presenting data organized around this, instead of "It's all Bush's fault and Romney wants to go back to that". The Dems were pushing Bush for not spending enough! Obama was a HUGE recipient of donations as a senator from Fannie and Freddie. MR should have made BO the poster boy of the housing bubble.

2) A flinch from the point that Ryan made against Biden about how Obama threw away what we did in Iraq by failing to establish an military forces agreement with the Iraqis. Instead, the Iraqis clearly saw and correctly understood that his will was lacking and so dismounted Baraq's weak horse and went with strong horses. Generally, Romney allowed Baraq to take an issue that has always been a Rep strength with his cardboard conservatism. I spoke of MR's tin ear on this many times. I started the Foreign Affairs thread here so that we can discuss the implications of moving from a uni-polar world back to a multi-polar world.

3) A thousand examples in this forum abound of things were strong attacks were there to be made e.g. should have hammered the Keystone Pipeline and the political reasons Obama blocked it. Yeah he mentioned it, but a much better case was there to be made.

4) Should have made a point of defining the unemployment rate as one including the number of people who have given up looking too i.e. a true rate currently near 11%.

5) Should have gone after Benghazi hard.

6) Should have had surrogates unleashed against the pravdas.

7) Should have unleashed Ryan to discuss the coming train wreck with spending and deficits.

Should have relentlessly pointed out that the proposed tax increases on the successful would generate only $80B a year.

9) Should have relentlessly pointed out that in effect BO increased taxes by increasing federal spending from 20 to 25% of GDP.

10) Allowed BO to get away with saying that our economic circumstances were the worst since the depression. NO. They were far worse when Reagan took office.

11) Overplayed the illegal immigration issue. When Newt spoke of going easy on granma who had been here 30 years, he chose the short term cheap political shop, leaving him no door to the latino vote, which was tough enough of a vote to begin with.

PS: I'm done with Dick Morris. In his own area of expertise he bet the house and lost the house.

Here is his explanation:

Why I Was WrongBy DICK MORRISPublished on DickMorris.com on November 7, 2012

Printer-Friendly VersionI've got egg on my face. I predicted a Romney landslide and, instead, we ended up with an Obama squeaker.

The key reason for my bum prediction is that I mistakenly believed that the 2008 surge in black, Latino, and young voter turnout would recede in 2012 to "normal" levels. Didn't happen. These high levels of minority and young voter participation are here to stay. And, with them, a permanent reshaping of our nation's politics.

In 2012, 13% of the vote was cast by blacks. In 04, it was 11%. This year, 10% was Latino. In '04 it was 8%. This time, 19% was cast by voters under 30 years of age. In '04 it was 17%. Taken together, these results swelled the ranks of Obama's three-tiered base by five to six points, accounting fully for his victory.

I derided the media polls for their assumption of what did, in fact happen: That blacks, Latinos, and young people would show up in the same numbers as they had in 2008. I was wrong. They did.

But the more proximate cause of my error was that I did not take full account of the impact of hurricane Sandy and of Governor Chris Christie's bipartisan march through New Jersey arm in arm with President Obama. Not to mention Christe's fawning promotion of Obama's presidential leadership.

It made all the difference.

A key element of Romney's appeal, particularly after the first debate, was his ability to govern with Democrats in Massachusetts. Obama's one-party strident approach, so much the opposite of what he pledged in his first national speech in 2004, had turned voters off. But by working seamlessly with an acerbic Republican Governor like Christie, Obama was able to blunt Romney's advantage in this crucial area.

Sandy, in retrospect, stopped Romney's post-debate momentum. She was, indeed, the October Surprise. She also stopped the swelling concern over the murders in Benghazi and let Obama get away with his cover-up in which he pretended that a terrorist attack was, in fact, just a spontaneous demonstration gone awry.

Obama is the first president in modern times to win re-election by a smaller margin than that by which he was elected in the first place. McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton all increased their re-election vote share significantly. Obama's dropped from a 7 point margin over McCain to a 1 point margin over Romney.

That he could get re-elected despite his dismal record is a tribute to his brilliant campaign staff and the shifting demographics of America. This is not your father's United States and the Republican tilt toward white middle aged and older voters is ghettoizing the party so that even bad economic times are not enough to sway the election.

By the time you finish with the various demographic groups the Democrats win, you almost have a majority in their corner. Count them: Blacks cast 13% of the vote and Obama won them 12-1. Latinos cast 10% and Obama carried them by 7-3. Under 30 voters cast 19% of the vote and Obama swept them by 12-7. Single white women cast 18% of the total vote and Obama won them by 12-6. There is some overlap among these groups, of course, but without allowing for any, Obama won 43-17 before the first married white woman or man over 30 cast their vote. (Lets guess that if we eliminate duplication, the Obama margin would be 35-13) Having conceded these votes, Romney would have had to win over two-thirds of the rest of the vote to win. He almost did. But not quite.

If Romney couldn't manage this trick against Obama in the current economy, no Republican could.

But that doesn't mean we just give up. Obama barely won this election and we still have a Republican House of Representatives. We still have the ability - and more important, the responsibility - to fight to keep this great country as we know it and love it.

We must stop Obama's socialist agenda. That's our job for the next four years. We cannot allow Obama to magnify his narrow victory into a mandate for larger government, bigger spending, and less freedom.

This is not a call for gridlock. If Obama moves to the center and proposes moderate measures, we should support them. But that's unlikely.

Egg on face for someone was a certainty with all prognositcators on both sides sure of a big win. From my viewpoint, there was no way to know in advance that the demographic groups hit the hardest by the current policies would really all show up and vote for more of the same. I had to see it to believe it.

I agree it is foolish to ignore the preponderance of the polls, but if they are so good why are they so different from each other. Isn't Gallup as good as any, they had Romney up 6%; final Gallup was 1% Romney, and still wrong by 3. Was this election 8 points different a week ago? I don't think so.

A short time ago I was feeling sorry for our friend Denny S from Venezuela election, how powerless that must feel. Now I feel it. We know our leaders lie to us, take from us, our economy is a disaster under their policies, they crush our freedoms and with our fellow citizens we say hey, how about 4 and 6 more years of it!

Crafty's point one sums it up for me. Republicans took none of the credit for what went right during the economic and revenue growth of 2003-2006 and took all the blame for what went wrong after power in Washington switched to Pelosi Reid congress including the Fannie Mae Sen. Obama, 2 years before he became President. You can't have messaging that bad and then expect to win with the people. (George Bush's fault.)

One reason Republicans couldn't attack Democrats hard for our myriad of failed programs is that their own fingerprints are also all over them.

The other big lesson is that Romney was politically wrong to go positive. He needed to go positive in order to govern but he needed to go hard negative early in order to win. Obama went with hide the agenda and attack your opponent from every angle. Attack before people even meet him. Now Obama gets to govern, but not with my consent.

I would be happy to admit I am wrong and Dems are right on economics. Freedom leads to failure and the nanny state solves it all. Someone just post the evidence.

The point CCP has been making rung true, the point that Romney botched so badly. There are so many people, approaching a majority, who think they don't have to pay in so they don't care what it all costs. Obamacare, free food on the card, housing, utilities, transportation, Obama phone, you name it. Your unfunded government is your provider, not the taxpayers who used to fund it.

The same 'rational electorate' who chose Obama and a Dem senate just chose a Republican House by a wide margin. (Will the President and Senate now honor their mandate?) House Republican reelection makes even less sense, the approval rate for congress hit an all time low of 10% this year. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/14/congress-approval-rating-all-time-low-gallup-poll_n_1777207.html Divided government didn't provide much for checks and balances, look at the lack of discoveries coming out of the Fast and Furious hearings. It really just makes for an unworkable partnership.

Heal? I don't think so. Just agreeing to be governed against my will. For me, I will just try to step back and care a little less about the future of our country and survive personally. As (BBG put it) the statists will run more and more of our lives. I really feel sorry for the next generation but this is to a large extent their doing.

Now the downward spiral continues. The R. House cannot authorize taxes or spending that they don't believe in; they also have commitments to their voters. Without caving on one side or the other there can't be a solution to the fiscal cliff. Dems will blame Republicans for 2 years for debt ceilings, shutdowns and stalemates and then try again to win the House, 60 in the Senate, and get complete control over us - again. And then what?

Wesbury, how is that election-neutral forecast going? Any chance of a downturn when the top capital gains tax rate triples, except in California where rates are going up even more.

Summer of Recovery, coming in 2015, again, after all the gridlock. Worked so well last time.------On a more positive note: Bigdog, how did your telecast go?

Agreed with the above posts. All very discouraging. Bob Grant may be right - it is already too late.

How do we attract Latinos to the repub part without simply trying to out bid the crats with tax payer funded bribes?

How do we deal with illegals? Latino and non Latino? We just grant them amnesty? WE offter them the chance for student loans, food stamps, obamacare? throw in a "free" cell phone?

American values are clearly no longer held by an increasingly larger and larger number of people.

Crafty, did you ever start the "direction of the Republican party" thread.

I really don't know how to compete with cold hard cash - confiscated from taxpayers and given away "free benefits" to a larger and larger electorate. Nothing competes with cold hard cash for a vote.

We can talk about freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, smaller government, capitalism, everyone has a chance to succeed, etc. But that will not work too well against a party that stuffs greenbacks (funny money that doesn't exist - 16 and counting trillion in debt) into their constituents pockets.